Banishing the blind spots | Intelligent Cranium Helmets iC-R gives you eyes in the back of your head

The idea of helmets with built-in head-up displays is far from new – the military first tested prototypes in the 60s and they’ve been in regular use since the 80s – and over the last few years we’ve seen a variety of attempts to bring the tech to bikes with varying levels of success.

But never have we seen a helmet with quite as much built-in tech as the Intelligent Cranium Helmets iC-R which launched onto the market at the start of 2025 after nearly a decade of development.

The US brand’s four-model range, all sharing the same style and shell, is led by the iC-Rs+ which comes in at a hefty £1539 but includes every piece of technology that the company can throw at it.

The head-up display (HUD) in front of the rider’s right eye is just the start. It can be connected to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay on your phone to give an array of apps and map-based navigation, but also gives access to one of the key innovations – a pair of rear-mounted cameras that provide a stitched-together 240-degree image of the road behind you, essentially eliminating the need for mirrors and giving an unobstructed view – for solo riders at least.

Those cameras are aided by dual proximity sensors that monitor your surroundings and look out for hazards, and between them there’s an LED taillight to make you more visible to traffic.

It doesn’t stop there, as the front of the iC-Rs+ features a 1080p HD camera that can be used to record footage onto 512gb of expandable storage. The same storage can be used for your music library, piped through to a built-in headset that doubles as a rider-to-rider communication system supporting group use of up to 15 riders, provided enough of your friends also purchase a similar setup.

Other features include a photochromatic visor that changes tint depending on light levels.

There’s voice control to operate the helmet, plus a bar-mounted physical controller that connects to the helmet by Bluetooth. These are also backed up by physical buttons on a detachable, bar-mounted controller.

Built-in battery powers the helmet’s systems for five to seven hours between charges, which use USB and take around three hours.

Further down the range, the iC-Rs at £1390 has similar features but loses the photochromatic visor and drops storage to 256gb, while the iC-R comes in at £967 and gets rid of the front-facing camera, while reducing the storage to 128gb.

At the bottom of the range, the iC-Re (for economy) costs £540 and has no cameras at all and a more basic communication system but retains the rear proximity sensors for blind spot alerts, as well as the HUD for maps and apps.

All the versions feature an emergency alert system that can detect a crash and automatically alert emergency contacts.

Intelligent Cranium Helmets began work on the idea back in 2015 and have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via crowdfunding. The company say the new lids have already undergone certification testing for ECE 22.06, with examples being made to order following their launch at the start of the year.